When Battered Women Kill

‘Mandotory reading’— San Francisco Examiner Chronicle

When Battered Women Kill

Angela Browne

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Acknowledgments

Many people participated in the genesis of this book. Laura Wolff and Eileen DeWald, at The Free Press, guided the manuscript through the publication process and encouraged me during those times when it seemed it would never be done. Joanne Drouin, my secretary, assistant and friend, smoothed my work life and shouldered as many of the burdens as she could. Linda Gott and Heidi Gerhardt worked on references and source notes, and Kathy Cole prepared the indexing manuscript.

Other people have been involved in the makings of this book from the beginning. The book would not have been written without the contribution of my Quaker parents, Delia and Loyde Osburn, who refused to let me become inured to brutality or suffering, and who have accepted with grace the fact that their daughter chose to study women who kill.

My thanks also go to:

Robert Elder and C. Robert Miller, my cherished other family, who believed in me and encouraged me from my first involvement with this work;

Lenore Walker and Roberta Thyfault—the team with whom I began studying battered women and conducting homicide evaluations;

Dorian Welch, who was the legal counsel on my first homicide case, and who has remained a concerned friend and advisor ever since; Katharine Thayer, whose example of courage and intellectual honesty has been a guide;

Steve Ipsen and Tim Collins, for the long hours they spent in preparing the data and running the analyses (and for all the jokes and chocolate bars);

Phil Shaver, for his extensive editing of an earlier draft; and Carol Barrett, Carolyn Simmons, Ralph Woehle, Willow Simmons, Michael Patton, and Mitch Handelsman, for their guidance and participation in the research and writing up of study results.

I would also like to express my appreciation to:

The staff of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, particularly to Murray Straus for his sweet spirit and unswerving belief in the value of this research, Larry Baron for his counsel and support, and Gerry Hotaling for his careful reading of the content;

Tessa-Storme Lyon and Ted Parkman, for their invaluable contributions to the process; Kirk Williams, for his optimism and blunt wisdom; and David Gillies, who kept the home fires burning and whose calm support helped smooth the year in which the book was written;

And to these friends, for enriching my life with their love, humor, and joy:

Bess Palmiciano, John Ahlgren

Jan Bamburger, Judy Meyers, Susan Turner

Gary Floyd, Cate Jones, Pat Foley

Lynn Miller, and David Gibson.

Most of all, I want to thank the women who shared the most painful details of their lives with me, and whose strength and endurance in the face of hardship inspired the writing: This is your book.

Introduction

In the summer of 1979 I began working on a research project in Denver, Colorado that involved interviewing battered women from six states about violence they had experienced in a relationship with a spouse or lover.¹

The questionnaire used was 200 pages long, and took six to eight hours to administer. I would spend an entire day with one woman in a room equipped with a couch, a chair, and a tape recorder. We were on the second floor of an old building; all the windows stood open, and my most vivid memory is of the cadence of women’s voices backed by the distant sound of sprinklers running on the lawn below us.

In what was usually a quiet and steady manner, woman after woman told of attacks by loved ones whose level of brutality paralleled that which I had previously associated only with assaults by strangers or with torture inflicted on prisoners in concentration camps. I came from a home where not even voices were raised. It was hard to believe what I was hearing, except that the accounts of different women from different backgrounds and circumstances were so similar.

Fall came and the furnace stuck on high. Again the windows stood open and, in bad weather, the snow blew in. Having a desk on the hall side became a high priority. But the project staff continued to interview women and I stayed on—amazed that a problem so serious could have been so long ignored; drawn by the challenges of trying to understand a phenomenon so vast and so well-hidden; and captivated by the strength and hope of the women before me.

The next summer, I was still there beginning work as a consultant on legal cases in which abused women were charged with the death or serious injury of their mates.²

I remember some of what I was thinking the morning of my first interview with one of these women. What would it be like to spend the day with someone who had killed another person? How would she act? What would she say?

She turned out to be a lot like other women I knew—like friends or family, like women in general—except that she had lived through experiences that, even to her, seemed unimaginable. I began looking for books about women who killed their partners, or even about partners who kill partners. I found only two.³

It seemed that the place to learn was from the women themselves.

For the next three years I conducted interviews with accused women, read corroborating documents, worked with their attorneys, and followed the outcomes of their trials. Some of the interviews took place in jails, the woman and I sitting in wooden chairs at wooden tables marked with messages from other women who had been there before us. One interview was conducted in the house where the homicide occurred; bullet holes were visible in the stairway and the man’s coat still hung in the hall.

The evaluations now took 10 to 12 hours to complete, and many more to code and write up. But the extensive questioning was providing a wealth of information about the dynamics of little-studied relationships, from the perspective of victims who struck back in their own defense.

This book tells these women’s stories, traces how their relationships progressed from affection to violence, and describes a pattern of events that led them to feel locked in with danger and so desperate that they killed a man they loved. Examples are drawn from the lives of 42 women from 15 states who were charged with the murder or attempted murder of their mates. Many details of these accounts were corroborated by hospital and police records and by the testimony of relatives and other witnesses; although, in most cases, only reports by the women are recorded here.

I have attempted to remain true to the ways in which the women told their stories, in order to preserve a sense of how the situations appeared to them. The decisions a woman makes in an abusive relationship are based on her perceptions of patterns and alternatives, so it is important to understand these perceptions as thoroughly as possible. Thus, the scenarios have been edited only as necessary to shorten the accounts and protect the women’s identities. All the names have been changed.

I struggled initially with how much to say—that is, how graphic to be. My goal was to convey as nearly as possible the essence of the women’s experiences; therefore, the accounts have remained fairly explicit. I am aware that this will upset some readers and seem unnecessarily dramatic to others. Violence is popular in novels and movies, where we can tell ourselves it is just a story, that someone made it up. However, some things just aren’t supposed to happen in our homes and families, and when these stories are presented to us as real, we are tempted to turn away. It is my hope that, instead of being put off by the violence, readers will make an attempt to imagine what it might be like to live with such brutality and to understand both victim and perpetrator. For those readers who have had similar experiences, the vignettes will sound hauntingly familiar.

If the accounts sometimes seem to be missing logical connections—I asked him what he wanted for dinner. He hit me and knocked me to the floor—it is because I am relating what the women told me about the incidents, based on their perceptions. If you find it confusing, that is how it seemed to the women as well. A part of what makes abusive interactions so powerful is their seemingly random, non-contingent nature. Battered women often spend years trying to understand what went wrong, hoping that if they can once comprehend it, they can then fix it. In the homicide group, however, the women’s attempts to live with a violent and unpredictable mate eventually resulted in an act of violence on their part as well.

Obviously, the homicide cases are extreme examples of what can go wrong between partners. However, they have much to say to us about how men and women in our culture deal with intimacy and affiliation. We all resemble these individuals in some ways; with capacities for desire and fear and a need for possession, for inflicting harm on those we love, and for cutting ourselves off from an awareness of another’s pain—be it emotional or physical—in the interest of our own self-protection or comfort. And these tendencies often show up most strongly in our relationships with the individuals with whom we live or are romantically involved. The value of understanding these extremes lies in the insight it can give us in evaluating our own lives and interactions, and locating where we are on this unclaimed continuum of abusive behavior toward those we love.

CHAPTER

1

Setting the Stage

A woman calls the police emergency number begging for help. She says she just shot her husband. Officers arriving at the scene note that she is bruised and there is evidence of an altercation. While ambulance attendants work on the dying man, police locate the weapon and test the woman’s hands for traces of gunpowder. Then they wrap her hands in plastic and lead her to a squad car, wending their way past neighbors gathered on the sidewalk. The woman is taken to jail, where she is interrogated. She attempts to reply to the officers’ questions, although her responses are disoriented and confused and she will later remember little of what she said. At some point she is informed that her husband is dead. She is asked to strip to the waist, so pictures can be taken of her injuries, and is booked on suspicion of murder. Later, testimony reveals that she had been beaten and sexually assaulted by her mate on numerous occasions, and that he threatened to kill her shortly before the shooting took place. The woman has no prior criminal record; she has a family, and has held a steady job.

Neighbors are shocked by the killing; such things don’t happen in their part of town. Relatives are grieved and defensive. They struggle with what to say when questioned; what to say in court, when the private lives of their family become front-page news. The man’s family, who knew the most about his abusiveness, are in the worst position: Will they aid in this woman’s defense, when she has just killed their son and brother? Could they have prevented it? Was his drinking to blame? Or was it her fault, for staying with him? They knew he sometimes hit her, but no one ever dreamed she would kill him.

What leads a woman who has occupied the role of victim, and who usually has no history of violent or illegal behavior, to use deadly force against her mate? What factors—in her perceptions, in the relationship, and in our society—precipitate the woman’s committing a homicide? Why would a woman remain with a man who assaults her or threatens to take her life? And why are men the primary perpetrators of severe violence against their partners? What evokes this response in some men?

THE INCIDENCE OF VIOLENCE IN FAMILIES

Early studies on criminal victimization focused primarily on violent incidents occurring outside the home. Most of these studies were conducted with incarcerated offenders—individuals labeled as comfortably different from the rest of us. Their problems were seen as stemming from unusual family backgrounds that were unique in being violent or disordered; or as attributable to a medical or psychological condition that provided a pathological explanation for their behavior.

Newspapers and other media emphasized the more sensational crimes and criminals. Assaults were depicted as occurring on city streets or in barroom brawls; rapes and murders were committed on the unsuspecting by deranged strangers; bad things happened to good people only when they were where they weren’t supposed to be: out late at night, in a dangerous part of town, in a place of questionable reputation. An impression was formed that the risk of personal injury lay primarily in individuals outside one’s circle of intimates. Violence in the family—if recognized at all—was rarely considered criminal unless a death occurred. The average family, it was assumed, afforded its members nurturance and protection. Individuals who left their homes and families were sometimes stigmatized, forcibly returned, or punished.

Yet current evidence identifies a reservoir of victimization that has existed almost unnoticed and, indeed, has been given permission to thrive within our culture. Research in the 1960s first began to document an unsuspected level of assaults within the nation as a whole. In 1968, in a nationally representative sample of 1,176 adults, one out of every 12 reported that they had been threatened or cut with a knife; one out of every 17 said they had been threatened or shot at with a gun; and one in 17 admitted having used a gun or a knife on another person in self-defense. (These incidents included only assaults that occurred as an adult, and excluded military action.) In addition, one-fifth approved of slapping a spouse on appropriate occasions; the percentage increased with higher levels of income and education, rising to 25 percent among the college educated. Contrary to popular impressions, experiences with violence were not confined to the poor or the working class. Violence was equally common among all income groups and education levels. The researchers concluded that the privacy of the middle-class life-style preserves an illusion of greater domestic tranquility…, but that, apparently, this was only an illusion.¹

The study of family violence, with an emphasis on child abuse, also began in the 1960s.²

At that time, there were almost no reports of abused wives, and those that existed attributed the assaults to personality disorders in both the women and the men. Violence in families was thought to be infrequent and to result from psychopathology in the individuals involved, rather than being seen as a society-wide problem of much greater proportions.³

It wasn’t until the early 70s that sociologists started to study these assaults on a wider scale, and shocked the nation with their findings on the percentage of American families in which such attacks occurred.⁴

In recent years, there has been an upsurge of inquiry into violence between intimates. Some researchers explain violence in families from the perspectives of stress theory, resource deprivation, conflict and aggression theory, structural inequality, and theories that attribute the occurrence of violence to the patriarchy and general discrimination against women in our society.⁵

Violence between romantic partners cannot be adequately understood, however, without consideration of the specific context in which it occurs: that of intimate relationships between men and women. Combining the more specialized topic of family violence with theories on relationships compels us to note the ways in which abuse by male partners and responses by female victims are extensions of our cultural expectations of romance and relating, and enables us to examine the similarities—as well as the differences—between relationships that include physical abuse and those limited to more normal interactions between couples.

In this country, a woman’s chances of being assaulted at home by her partner are greater than that of a police officer being assaulted on the job. Books that document such abuse and describe the nature of the attacks have been written about the so-called battered woman. Little is known, however, about the progression of such violence, or about those cases in which an abusive relationship culminates in death. Yet these issues surely deserve our attention.

Many spousal homicides are preceded by a history of abuse, and women jailed for the slaying of their mates frequently were beaten by them.⁶

Many of these women sought help from the police or others prior to the lethal incident but either the urgency of their situation was not understood, or the alternatives offered were inadequate to allow them to escape. A more adequate understanding of the dynamics of relationships marked by violence could enable us to avert at least some of the homicides that now occur in desperation, and identify and intervene with those couples at risk for severe and continued assaults.

VIOLENCE BETWEEN PARTNERS

How often does violence between partners occur? In a national survey of over 2,000 homes conducted in 1975 and published in 1980, Murray Straus, Richard Gelles, and Suzanne Steinmetz questioned married couples and found that more than one quarter (28 percent) reported at least one instance of physical assault in their relationships; 16 percent reported violent incidents in the year just prior to the study. Of these incidents, over one-third were serious assaults involving acts such as punching, kicking, hitting with an object, and assaults with a knife or gun. A follow-up survey conducted in 1985 found the exact same percentage reporting violent incidents in the twelve months prior to the study. These estimates are supported by the results of a Harris poll using similar questions, which found that 21 percent of women respondents had been physically attacked by a male partner at least once. This figure was much higher for those who had been recently separated or divorced; of these women, two-thirds reported violence in their former relationships.⁷

Other studies conducted in U.S. cities confirm these percentages. In a random sample in San Francisco, 21 percent of women who had been or were currently married reported at least one occasion of physical abuse by their mates.⁸

Similarly, researchers attempting to find a group of nonbattered women to compare with a sample of physically abused wives in Pittsburgh found that 34 percent of their control group also reported being attacked by a partner.⁹

Though the majority of respondents in these studies did not report violence, these figures mean that over a million-and-a-half women in the United States are physically assaulted by a partner each year.¹⁰

Of course, many people just don’t tell researchers about violence in their families, so these figures are underestimates of the true incidence of violence between partners. The true incidence of abuse between partners may be nearly double what people report in surveys.

HOW SERIOUS IS FAMILY VIOLENCE?

Because we think of families as safe and even companionable, the phrase family violence seems almost a contradiction in terms. When the words are linked together, the emphasis shifts to the family, and the meaning of violence is modified by our particular images of home. Domestic violence has a tame sound—like a household pet, no longer wild. A domestic problem sounds minor and uninteresting; perhaps trouble with bill-paying or disagreements over the division of household chores. Somehow, we devalue incidents that occur in the home. News accounts still report serious assaults and even murders between partners as the result of a domestic argument, masking the extremity of the acts and the history of threat and brutalization that frequently preceded such events.

Yet it would be a mistake to imagine that, although we now know more physical attacks are perpetrated by intimates than by strangers, attacks by family members are probably not as serious as those by outsiders. In comparing assaults involving intimates with assaults involving strangers, the 1980 National Crime Survey found that when the attacker was a stranger, just over one-half (54 percent) of the victims sustained injuries. However, when the attacker was related, three-fourths of the victims were injured. In addition, three-fifths of the attacks by relatives occurred at night, when most of the victims were home safe. We lock our doors at night to keep the danger out. However, many people are actually locked in with the danger: Their place of greatest risk is their home.

MUTUAL COMBAT

How mutual is the violence between romantic and/or married partners? When violent assaults occur in relationships, are men or women more likely to be the perpetrators? Are there differences between men and women when one looks at relatively minor physical assaults, versus more serious actions and injuries?

In the Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz study of American families, nearly half (49 percent) of the couples who reported violence said that both partners had used some kind of force; in 27 percent of the cases, only the husband had been assaultive; and in 24 percent, only the wife had been assaultive. However, Straus and his colleagues noted that, because of men’s greater average size and physical strength and their tendency toward greater aggressivity, the same acts frequently have quite a different effect in terms of pain, injury, and threat when performed by a woman and a man.¹¹

Men are also better able to avoid physical victimization than are women. As Mildred Pagelow (1984) observed:

Men are, on the average, larger and muscularly stronger than women, so if they choose to strike back they can do greater physical harm than is done to them, they can nonviolently protect themselves from physical harm, or they can leave the premises without being forcibly restrained, (p. 274)

In the Straus study, assaultive actions were divided into categories of relatively minor (threw something at the other; pushed, grabbed or shoved; slapped) and severe (kicked, bit, punched, hit with an object, beat up, threatened with a knife or gun, used a knife or gun). Despite the seemingly equal appearance of assaultive behavior when looked at separately, when analyzing the results this way, Straus and his colleagues found that men had a higher rate of using the most dangerous and injurious forms of violence—such as physically beating up their partners or using a knife or a gun—and that when violent acts were committed by a husband, they were repeated more often than they were by wives. In addition, a large number of violent attacks against wives occurred when the women were pregnant, thus increasing the risk of injury and of miscarriage or stillbirth.

Although the Straus study has been cited often as evidence for the mutuality of violence, several other factors should be taken into account. First, the Straus sample was restricted to couples who were living together currently; recently separated or divorced couples were not included in the inquiry. Second, information on violent acts was gathered from only one member of a couple, without corroboration from the other partner or other sources, and without a means for ascertaining possible differences in the reports of the victims and the perpetrators of violence. Also, the study was not designed to ask about injuries sustained from the violence, nor about what proportion of the acts were in response to violence initiated by the other or in self-defense. Finally, questions about violence were set in a context of settling disputes in a conflict situation and, therefore, may not have elicited information about attacks that seemed to come out of the blue. These are crucial factors for assessing the mutuality of combat, and some of them have been investigated in more depth by other researchers.

As noted earlier, separated and divorced couples appear to have extremely high rates of violence, especially violence perpetrated by husbands. Thus, a greater impression of mutuality may result when one studies intact couples than when divorced or separated couples are included. In the 1982 National Crime Survey, for instance, 91 percent of all violent crimes between spouses were victimizations of women by husbands or ex-husbands, while only 5 percent were victimizations of husbands by wives or ex-wives.

The identity of the person doing the reporting also seems to be important in assessing what weight to give responses. Studies of crime victims show a surprising tendency to forget even fairly serious attacks. Experience with women victims of a partner’s violence confirms this. Battered women, especially those who have been victimized over a long period, tend to underestimate both the frequency and the severity of the violence they experience when their reports are compared to the reports of witnesses or to hospital and other records. Similarly, experts working with abusive men note that the men greatly underreport their violent actions; they minimize or deny assaultive behavior against their wives, and claim more involvement by the victim in justification of their violence than witness or police reports would support.¹²

Thus, in a study combining estimations of violence by male perpetrators on female victims, one is faced with the possibility that the perpetrators will sound less violent and more victimized, while the victims will appear to have been less severely assaulted and more likely